An official ceremony welcomed this Sunday, December 25 evening at Tehran airport the fourteen Iranian fishermen who had been detained in Somalia by the Shebabs for several years. They had been abducted in international waters in 2014 and, according to the official Iranian agency, they were released after ” lengthy negotiations with government officials, tribal and traditional Somali leaders “.
The haggard foreigners had been found by Somali police in the port of Hobyo in Galmudug state in central Somalia in late November. Some were injured. Among them, six Pakistanis and fourteen Iranians. They claimed to be former hostages of the barely released jihadist group of Shebabs.
The Somali police had immediately launched an investigation, fearing that it was rather foreign fighters like the shebabs have hundreds of them. But it turned out that the fourteen Iranians were indeed fishermen, previously detained by the al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group. They had apparently been kidnapped in international waters, off the coast of Somalia, in 2014. Perhaps, according to a local source, by a group of pirates who would have sold them to Shebabs.
Hostage-taking of Iranian fishermen, who operate very far from their coasts in the Indian Ocean – sometimes illegally – has been frequent over the past fifteen years. Their fate often depended on fights or resales between criminal groups. Two years ago, three Iranians captured in 2015 along with 16 other members of their crew, eight of whom died at the hands of their captors, were finally released after nearly six years in detention.